Here are the excerpts from the round table from Spencer and other leading including Andrew Prior, Arri rental, Jeff Brown, Brownian motion, Rupert Watson & Sebastian Khanlo, Jigsaw24 and Melanie Georgieva, Take 2 films
It’d be remiss of me if I didn’t touch on the effects Covid-19 had on businesses in 2020. Have there been any positives
SPENCER WEEKES: Like most businesses going into 2020, we didn’t begin the year with an understanding that a pandemic was about to disrupt not just our business, but the entire industry. In the weeks that followed the initial lockdown, we had the rarest of things – time – time to examine our business, to consider the technical changes that were occurring in the industry and, most importantly, to devise tools and technologies that could help productions resume shooting. So, while being shut down was extremely challenging for our business financially, we managed to pull through and support a number of major productions to continue filming in the UK and Europe. The move to remote working has changed our focus entirely and we are sure the solutions we’ve been able to provide can impact the industry positively moving forward.
With a lot of talent setting up from home this year, have you seen an increase in the demand for streaming equipment?
SW: Very early on, we saw that streaming and remote production services would be key to our industry’s return to work and, because of our background in providing video transmitters, we knew that our expertise and support would become paramount as the requirement
for streaming and social distancing grew. As well as devising streaming solutions under our Arklink brand, we also built up a whole new sector within major motion pictures with our Commslink, enabling real-time, conversational communication across a wide range of locations. These two technologies were paramount in helping several large studio blockbusters, as well as numerous TV productions, commercials and documentaries, get back to shooting.
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